Sunburst

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  She stopped and leaned against a wall to rest. She was dreadfully tired; limp and creaking. She sighed. She had seen and heard a lot, and learned something. She had plowed through books and spoken with Urquhart and Marczinek and the rest; she had seen the Dumplings in action and manipulated them, if only for a few moments. Now she had data to work on, even if it was shallow and fragmentary. She wanted food and sleep to feed her brains, and time to think and let her unconscious work for her.

  She had chosen sides irrevocably. Prothero might not see eye to eye with her on the subject—she might never even see him or the others again—but she was committed to him and his Dump. She would find out what made Dumplings tick, how to handle them, what Margaret Mead would have done, and more. And when she had done that she would be a step closer to knowing what she herself was.

  In the meantime she was only an awfully tired and hungry girl. She went on.

  Stores and houses crammed into each other here, even on a main street, crowding the sidewalk. Sorrel Park, like many an ancient walled city, was composed of slums. But there was no castle on the hill…

  She passed a faintly-lit window. It was the only illumination on the street and she glanced in, and stopped. The sash was up, and past the tattered lace curtain puffing softly in the night wind she could see two little girls bouncing on a big rackety bed with brass spindles. They were wearing nightgowns and had flowing black hair; they were only about five or six years old.

  They made themselves a world of peace and innocence for a moment in the circle of light from an oil lamp on a crate by the bed; and they were playing pat-a-cake in the furious and ancient plip-plap-crossclap of all children of Time. She had played it with the Slippec kids in her own time, and to the same song.

  I’m just a small-town sweetheart;

  I love my familee, lee, lee,

  And after dark

  In Sorrel Park

  I’m happy as can be, be, be…

  Their voices quavered with every bounce, but they were extraordinarily clear and sweet on the foreboding air:

  My father rolls the rubbydubs,

  My mother minds the still;

  I dance the jig

  In Clancy’s Pig

  And my brother cracks the till…

  Oh, I’m just—

  A harsh voice in a foreign language cried out from within and broke the thread of their gaiety. The song trailed off, one of the little girls jumped up and blew out the flame, and Shandy moved on. They would soon be tired of that song; it was only a sober description of everyday life. But the silver thread of sound wove in and out of her thoughts: And after dark, in Sorrel Park, what will become of me, me, me?

  She passed the silent crossroads at Eighth Avenue, and traversed a block in stillness unbroken except for the yowling of three cats in unreproved chorus.

  As she reached Ninth the air began to tremble with a distant noise. It had the ominous quality she had felt in the previous silence. Two blocks up Ninth she made out dancing points of light that might be torches. She felt, rather than saw, that there were masses of people crowded on the sidewalk and raising their voices in the dark animal cry of the mob.

  This was something ugly, something she was not going to run blindly into this time. She crossed the street swiftly and pulled back into the shadow of a doorway, straining her eyes on the long diagonal. The night was dark, they were many yards away, and there was nothing discernible from the distance. She moved up the street, close to the small shelter of the uneven walls. She remembered her resolve to avoid mobs and rioting, and it occurred to her once that instead of moving ahead cautiously she ought to be moving away expeditiously, but there was nothing going on in the whole world that she did not want to know about, and Sorrel Park was the world.

  The crowd was milling about in front of a small low building. She recognized it: it was the Tabernacle of the Latterday Evangel of Sorrel Park, and normally housed a small bitter sect which had formed twenty-five years ago from the opposite end of the spectrum that produced the hoodlums and the Dumplings; it had so far been unable to send an evangel from its center. Fitch, a loyal fence-straddler, had belonged to it. Now the membership seemed suddenly to have swelled.

  It was obvious that aside from the smoke and the noise there was nothing crucial taking place on the sidewalk; all the action must be going on inside, and she would never get inside unnoticed. And it looked dangerous. She watched for a few moments, trying to make sense of the indistinguishable grumbling. Shivers of sound echoed on the walls: “—outa here! Yeah, give’m the boot! What’n hell we waitin’ for?”

  Someone did not like the status quo.

  The atmosphere was more dangerous than interesting. As she was about to move on with her curiosity unquenched she noticed one thing that was strange apart from the rest: one man was standing quite still, with his arms crossed, a few yards away from the others. His face was in the dark, but the position of his body indicated that he was keeping watch—perhaps for civvies, more likely MPs.

  His stance made her uneasy. With his senses on the alert he would be the first to catch any movement across the street. One of the torches brightened and shook itself; the flare lit one side of his face, a mad half-moon. She could have sworn he was staring at her.

  She ran. Turning the first corner she skimmed, awkward as a flamingo, past another deserted cross street in a town of dark chessboard squares, past Tenth and down Eleventh, stopping finally at the first corner, a block above Main.

  Quiet here still. She stopped to rest, breath searing her lungs. But the stillness between breaths was reassuring. She turned back toward Tenth; just half a block from the Pypers now.

  At Tenth she peered round the corner of a rickety wooden shed housing a shoe repair. There was a distant angry murmur from the crowd, but silence around her. Then too late, she heard the creaking on the low wooden boards of the roof and somebody fell on her.

  What breath she had left was knocked out of her, a hand twisted her arm behind her back before she could move, and as she wrenched her neck to squint upward something metallic raked across her face and caught a sword of light as it swung under the moon. It was a hook.

  It caught under her arm and pulled her up, bruised and stumbling. She cried out, but her captor was wordless. She glimpsed him, a wiry man dressed in shabby working-clothes, narrow bony face, pale eyes, straw-colored hair growing like crabgrass.

  One-handed and mute: a memory stirred. You broke my wrist bringin’ me in, Foxy, remember?

  LaVonne had shut Fox up for good.

  “Fox!” she whispered. “What do you want?” But he paid no attention and she wondered if he had lost his wits to the Dumplings as well as his voice. With his good hand on her twisted arm, pushing in the small of her back, he propelled her down the street at a run.

  They passed Pyper’s Drygoods. The store was as dark and deserted as the rest of the huddled place. But there was a litter on the sidewalk, and close up she saw dark stains on the cement and scattered feathers eddying in the faint night winds. A few steps later she realized what had happened and stopped short. Twisting in Fox’s grip, she bent double, retching emptily. The Dumplings had been here this morning; she knew their style. Having nothing better to do, they had killed Douggy’s pigeons.

  A memory of the birds flapping and cooing about his neck hit her like a blow between the eyes. Tears sprang from squeezed lids; she sensed more powerfully than a telepath the painful aura of Douggy’s rage and sorrow. Fox pushed her forward roughly, and she stumbled upright. She had had nothing to vomit in her empty stomach and her throat ached.

  At Main, Fox paused and looked back and forth. Satisfied that there were neither MPs nor civvies to worry about yet, he crossed the street and began the backtrack toward the Tabernacle deviously by lanes and alleys. She let him push her; she was too weak to yell. Besides, if no-one had been paying attention to three yowl
ing cats in the full voice of the summer season they would not likely be on the alert to rescue her. She had no faith in the morality of Sorrel Park and the few people who cared about her were as far and unreachable as the moon.

  * * * *

  She saw the mob close: rough men and screeching women at the Tabernacle entrance, but Fox got her through them in a mad drive like a hot knife through butter.

  The air inside was hot, smoky, and fetid. The inevitable folding chairs were invisible under the hard press of bodies, black masses of ominous bee swarms. Fox shoved her down the narrow aisle leaving her to find footing among the outstretched legs. An oratorical voice from the platform boomed indistinguishable words vibrating on the heavy air.

  When they reached the platform, Fox stopped, and she looked up for the first time. Three hard chairs were ranged onstage in a neat row. They were occupied—by Casker and his two civvies, all bound and gagged. The man at the lectern, mouth open and pale pudgy hands spread wide, was Fitch.

  Somehow, Shandy was not surprised. Fitch at that moment stopped for breath, mopped his beaded head, pushed up his armbands with a flourish, and went on.

  “Do we need it here? Do we need a Dump should have been blasted off the face of our fine city before it ever got started? Do we need an MP sitting on us thirty years, no decent food or clothes, no jobs, no new Tri-V or cars, a place where decent people have to go underground to get a little harmless entertainment?”

  The crowd yelled, a torch flamed and scattered sparks.

  “Do we need this Gestapo we got for a police force? Can’t you and I and all the rest of the good people here find a way to run a city better than this?” Fitch certainly had nothing to lose, since he had prematurely cut off most of his liquor supply before Sorrel Park was opened.

  As the crowd cheered, Fox, never once loosening his grip, reached over and tapped the side of the lectern with his hook.

  Fitch blinked impatiently, lowered his arms from their embracing gesture, and bent forward slightly. Fox drove Shandy so hard against the edge of the platform her ribs nearly cracked—the gesture intending to convey the devotion of a dog bringing home the evening paper, or a dead rat—and stared up at Fitch with a dog’s eyes.

  Fitch glanced at Shandy and turned pale. He gaped like a fish for one second, then bent lower and spat through clenched teeth, “You goddam fool, what the hell’d you have to bring her here for?”

  Fox recoiled and let her go. Shandy struggled to revive and straighten her arm, now almost paralyzed. Fitch’s tongue flicked his lips. Breathing hard, he turned to his audience once more.

  But in the small hiatus, Shandy, still rubbing her arm, yelled, “Hey, Fitso, you can’t butter your bread on more’n two sides!”

  She forgot her aches and pains and hoisted her way up on the platform by hands and knees. She was panting and breathless, clothes and skin dirt-smeared. The money, still folded in her pocket, had begun to burn a hole in her spirit, and the flame leaped through her body to her livid eyes. She was going to get her money’s worth of something.

  Fitch was a quick thinker. He sneered, “Who let you out of the Dump?”

  Fox was clawing his way up on the platform, and Fitch raised his hands. “My friends, this unfortunate—”

  Shandy was on her feet dancing out of the way of Fox’s sweeping claw, and a woman’s yell cracked the heavy atmosphere.

  “Hey, Fitch! Hey Fitch! Wha’d she mean by that, hey? Wha’d she mean by that, Fitch?”

  The voice belonged to Ma Slippec.

  She rose, pulling herself out of a black clump of bodies, and climbed over close-crammed knees amid protests to the aisle. Her jaw was splinted in a scaffolding of slender metal rods, and beneath it the cords of her gaunt eroded neck rose like bridge-spans.

  “Hey Shandy, it’s yer ma! Don’t be scared, dearie!” She broke her way down the aisle, elbowing, treading toes, waving her shawl.

  Fitch lost control and screamed. “F’God’s sake, Loretta, close your busted trap!” The name was grotesque applied to her person, dark and weathered as a blasted tree. Shandy had never thought of her as owning a first name.

  “You don’t tell me!” she screamed. “You made money offa my corn eight years, you gitcher hands offa my kid!” Her sufferings: the loss of Frankie, the broken jaw, the battered still, the miseries of a civvy jail—had gathered in this sharp moment to form a driving hammerhead. She would subside in five minutes, but while she was going she was a force.

  Shandy was treading on Fox’s good hand, and his mouth worked with soundless curses. Fitch moved toward her, but she danced away. She had no hope, but she had enough spirit left to be hopping with delight at the danger, the drama, and the corn of the whole rowdy scene.

  Ma Slippec meanwhile grabbed Fox by the collar and flung him sprawling into somebody’s lap. She jumped up on the platform and planted herself between Fitch and Shandy. “Go on, kid!”

  Fitch was a man possessed. He would have wrung her neck but for the image he was trying to present to the audience.

  Shandy was not anxious to be defended by this wild apparition, but she yelled out, “Who put the civvies onto your still, Ma? Who got your jaw bust? Who sicced the Dumper’s peeper on me?”

  Voices called, “Hey Fitch, what’s all—”

  Fitch howled, streaming with rage and sweat, “She’s a Dumpling herself! She—”

  Shandy hooked the money out of her pocket and swiftly folded it into a dart.

  “Who got scared and gimme a twenty to get out of the way?” She shot the dart over Ma Slippec’s shoulder and it hit Fitch square between the eyes. The crowd noise fell for a moment. Twenty dollars, in Sorrel Park’s deflated currency, was something.

  But Fitch had other lieutenants than Fox. Two or three burly ones were climbing over the edge of the stage. Shandy looked about apprehensively. The doors were solidly blocked. Ma Slippec, faced with a choice of attacking Fitch or defending Shandy, whirled about and clutched her fiercely, scraping her already battered face with the splint.

  “Doncha dare! Git offa there, ye dirty bums!” But they were coming ahead anyway.

  Fitch raised his arms once more. “Quiet! Please! We’ll get this cleared up!”

  Two of the men were already pulling Shandy and her protector apart.

  Pop!

  The noise broke like a shot, but more intense and peculiar.

  And everything was still.

  A figure presented itself, breaking the thick smoky ray of light from the projection booth. It was a young Negro boy wearing a checked shirt and frayed jeans. He was perfectly comely and ordinary except that his dirty frazzle-laced sneakers were dancing a good two feet in the air above the platform. His narrow ironic face was composed, but his eyes were sparkling, and the set of his body right to the top of his peppercorn head was so vigorous and joyous, and so utterly full of delight, that he seemed to be covered with spangles.

  He pointed a finger as authoritative as Prospero’s wand to Casker and his men: their bonds fell away. He reached a hand into the air, picked out three guns one after the other, and tossed them to the three civvies.

  No-one else moved; the unhypnotized civvies were dumbfounded. He said, in a soft treble voice, “Come on, Shandy, what’re you waiting for?”

  Shandy’s imminent captor fell to the floor with the snarl frozen on his face, and she climbed down numbly. The boy had landed in the aisle and she took his hand. They walked out of the door past the knot of living statues and down the street without any hurry.

  She finally got her voice to work; it was feeble and squeaky. “Gee, I’m glad you dropped in, but wow! did you ever cut it fine!”

  He sighed blissfully. “Boy, that was something I been dreaming of doing all my whole life!”

  Sunburst: 10

  The fires snuffed themselves, the noises died away behind them into murmurs and confusion, th
e night was dark. They ran past silent closed hives of red brick, round corners into quiet streets where the deep leaves of early summer rustled overhead. There was nothing to see of the boy but the white squares in the checker pattern of his shirt. She stopped, finally, gasping. “I can’t run anymore.” She was doubled with a stitch.

  “Listen!” he hissed. “You hear that noise?”

  There was a small distant clamor not at all like the grumbling of the crowd before. “Downtown’s full of MPs. I can’t pk you an’ I ain’t gonna be caught in the street.”

  She clutched her side. “You go ahead. Tell me where I have to go and I’ll get there myself.”

  He hesitated. Immediately a branch bent down from the tree above and swiped him sharply in the face. She jumped back, startled.

  He grinned sheepishly. “Jason says he’ll skin me alive if I leave you. Now come on!”

  He led her through a maze of crooked streets toward the eastern limit of the town. If she had not been half-crippled with exhaustion Shandy might have laughed. Fitch had told her to hole up in the east end.

  They finished in a mean street where the roads needed repairs, like every other district in the penumbra. The boy stopped at a white clapboard house; a picket fence enclosed a scrubby lawn with a small twisted apple tree.

  As she stumbled along the path with him, and up the steps, the front door swung open with a haunted-house creak. She hesitated at the threshold.

  “Gee whiz, what’re you waitin’ for now?”